In 'Were Egyptians Black?' I stated that Arab slave owners of blacks kept the black population down by having midwives drown the newborn in a bucket. A reader who has read much on the Middle East in native languages questioned me on the source. Not being able to place it immediately [as I usually can] I noted that it was probably in Hugh Thomas’s book on The Slave Trade, simply because I had made over 100 citations in that book. However, I have not been able to find this reference anywhere other than in my novel The Jericho Bone.

When writing such a novel with supernatural aspects I try not to introduce fictional elements beyond plotting and said supernatural elements. This has to do with maintaining suspension of disbelief in the mind of the reader, which is made easier for the author who minimizes the fanciful elements he introduces. If I do not have a historical source, I might transpose something from another place in the same time or another time in the same place. This is rare and in that novel I made two decisions to do so. One was to take a modern Islamic slave practice of cutting a whole in the bed for a pregnant woman to lay on her front while being taken from behind by a brothel customer. The other was a messy execution in a Mongol camp from the same period of the novel, which was set in Egypt.

But I made no decision to put this item in. As Stefan Molyneux states in the documentary below a black slave girl’s baby was generally murdered. He does not specify how they were killed other than to quote an explorer mentioning the death of a slave baby by the perennial method of bashing its brains out.

Furthermore, according to my research done on household furnishings in 12th century Egypt, household furnishing of wood were rare. In fact, I pushed the limit on how much wooden furnishings appear in the setting by focusing most interior scenes in the dwelling of the wealthy. Also, in an arid landscape, why waste water drowning an unwanted child? Currently, in India, where midwives charge $2.50 for suffocating a female newborn, the child may simply be prevented from taking its first breath.

So how did I come up with the bucket scene in the novel which I later mistakenly referenced as being based on a historical reference?

This was driving me crazy last night as I walked to work in a thunder storm. Having decided to view the video below as a last resort to find the bucket reference—which at this point I did not expect to find, as it didn’t make sense due to the dearth of wood and water and the hassle of such a method compared to suffocation or smashing—I was walking behind the tow motor I have used to pull pallets out of the dairy cooler for six years. As I turned the corner I once again, for the one thousandth or more times, made a mental note to avoid the 10 gallon bucket of olives that is always left on the floor next to the warehouse rack because it is heavy for the deli girls to lift. As I turned the corner and looked down to make sure I didn’t crack the bucket with the steel leg of the tow motor I saw something that I have now seen so many times that I had failed to note it until that moment—an illustration of a baby falling head first into a half-filled bucket, with a danger advisory printed in Spanish.

That is my best guess for my erroneous statement that Arab slave owners drowned the babies of their property in buckets—possibly convoluted with accounts of white and black American slaves drowning themselves and their babies out of spite for their owners—when the evidence seems to suggest brain trauma and dry suffocation as the method.

Thank you, B. This is the type of detail that editors grill you on and without an editor for nine out of ten of my projects, I depend on astute readers like you to keep me from “going off the rails.”

At 27 minutes Stefan gets into some specifics on white slavery that are well done. I am really glad that I listened to this presentation again.